http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/obesit...ible-1.2663585

Hi all! I'm back, like a recent poster, for a third time. Maybe fourth time. LOL. I can't remember when I was here last, but serendipitously I won't have to update my ticker, because I am the same weight again after being about 25 pounds in to another attempt. A few years ago in 2007 I lost down to about 225. Gained back up to 430 from there, a shocking all time high for me. It took me YEARS to forgive myself and start again. And again and again and again.

The article I pasted to begin this post was criticized by commenters as extremely discouraging. I think it's extremely EMPOWERING. We need to understand how thoroughly the odds are against us to understand our own behaviours and be absolutely vigilant and hyper aware of our own pitfalls. For me it tends to be either all in or all out. Losing or gaining. I never maintain, ever. So learning to 'right the ship' when I've failed or given in to emotional eating is critical. Last weekend I completely blew it for three days. Ate junk food and take out for three people, for three days. Sunday night, stuffed full of pizza, I called a stop to it right there and then and went for a 45 minute walk. I have been okay all week and today have relost the bloat and weight from the weekend. In fact I made my first mental goal of being under 350 again.

Ugh. So hard having a weight that starts with '3'. More so for those of us that have hit '4's and '5's.

Welcome back MetaChick!

I have been giving this a lot of thought lately. I know of 3 people who have lost a large amount of weight without surgery and kept it off for years/decades. One just did it. The other two lost their weight after the kids grew up.
However when I give it more thought... In the not so long ago past being over 200 pounds was almost unheard of. We in the 300+ crowd are in a relatively new territory. Just my two cents.
So where does this leave us?

I struggle tremendously with my eating/weight, and the ONLY thing keeping me in the struggle, is knowing that the odds are AGAINST me.

Most of my life, I've thought and been told I was fat because I was lazy, crazy, stupid, or selfish.

I'm not afraid of hard work, or of trying very, very difficult things, but when you tell me something I find difficult "should be easy," I feel like an idiot that it doesn't come easy to me.

For decades I was led to believe that weight loss was or could be easy, and I WAS the idiot (or worse) for struggling.

Now that I know the lousy odds, I understand why I don't find weight loss easy - because darn it! Weight loss IS difficult.

Just refusing to feel crazy, lazy, stupid, selfish or bad about my weight and weight struggles is keeping me on the journey.

Knowing the lousy odds helps me feel like less of a freak for having to work SO hard just to make slow progress.

I would have given up long ago (if fact, I had given up, not all that long ago) if I still thought that weight loss success wasn't supposed to be this hard.

It IS hard, so even small successes need to be celebrated like the HUGE achievements that they really are.

Not gaining is a huge success, but we're generally taught to label anything less than losing at least a pound per week as failure and as a result, most of us feel like failures when we're actually succeeding.

I firmly believe that unrealistic expectations tend to be a much bigger obstacle to weight loss than awareness of the failure rate.

At the very least, it helps to realize that "everyone else" isn't having more success and an easier time of it than we are.